Symposium
on International Watershed Management Reveals Need for Public
Participation

Public participation in watershed management
may be crucial to balancing a region’s
competing demands for water use and the desire to preserve the
environment,
said
officials and
scholars at “Improving Public Participation and Governance
in International Watershed Management,” an international
symposium held April 18–19 at the Law School.

Participants from five continents gathered to discuss how to
involve the public in management of large watersheds that cross
national boundaries. Because they lie within the jurisdiction
of several nations, these watersheds pose difficult management
challenges, and people living along these international watercourses
may have little or no voice in decisions that affect them, said
Law Professor and symposium organizer Jonathan
Cannon.

“There are more robust versions of public participation” than
merely asking the public to comment on plans, Cannon said in
his introduction to the symposium’s first panel. “In
these more robust versions there are opportunities for the convergence
of public participation and governance in meaningful ways. Our
goal is to explore those opportunities in the management of transboundary
resources.”

Ecological Disasters Increased Public’s
Role

Increasing public involvement in watershed
planning and lessening reliance on top down, regulation-based
approaches may yield better
results and avoid future lawsuits, panelists said during “The
Role of Public Participation in Decision-making: Essential or
Dispensable in Watershed Management?,” but participants
disagreed about the role of federal environmental regulations
in sparking the public’s activist response.

Columbia Law Professor Bradley Karkkainen
argued that watershed management and ecosystem preservation
is moving toward a postsovereign
model that doesn’t fit the traditional model of federal-
and state-enforced regulations. He said there are limitations
to such a statecentric approach, especially when ecosystems are
a “mismatch to territorially defined political boundaries,” such
as the Great Lakes.

University of Colorado Law Professor David Getches noted that
the U. S. has only recently invited the public into watershed
management decisions, after realizing that excluding the public
leaves the government vulnerable to lawsuits.

“In the United States today, we find ourselves in an era
of rethinking decisions that were made 30 or even 100 years ago,” Getches
said—decisions made with one goal in mind, beginning
with the Jeffersonian ideal of fertilized fields for agriculture,
and later support of expansion into the West. Dams, for example,
were once largely a matter of politics, and experts were brought
in solely to build the dam itself, not examine its effects on
the environment. “Feasibility meant technical feasibility,” he
said, and states were in competition over which could pull in
the most federal largesse.

International Financial Institutions May Foster Public Involvement

International financial institutions
like the World Bank and the African Development Bank (ADB)
can play key roles in improving
public involvement in watershed planning, according to participants
in the panel, “Public Involvement in International Financial
Institutions,” but frustration over international involvement
in local matters was also apparent in the audience.

Although water projects make up only
a percentage of the billions of dollars loaned by the World
Bank to developing countries each
year, “by far the projects that get the most attention
are large-scale hydro projects,” according to World Bank
lawyer Charles DiLeva. In the U. S. 75–80 percent of the
hydro capacity has been developed, but in Africa that figure
is at five percent, DiLeva said, noting the double standard implicit
in scrutinizing the water management decisions of Africa. Today
funding for large-scale projects comes from multilateral institutions
that have environmental concerns, he said, and the construction
is carried out through private entities. DiLeva said World Bank
activities typically focus on the sensitive issues that private
companies don’t finance.

Success Depends on Conditions that Vary Widely Among Watersheds

Three panels addressed actual experiences
in managing large watersheds around the world—from
the Mekong River in Asia, to the Danube in Europe, the Niger
and the Nile in Africa,
and the Great Lakes Basin in North America. Panelists generally
agreed that effective public participation contributes to efficient
and fair decisions. But they also concluded that the conditions
necessary for effective participation were more present in some
places than in others. These conditions included stable democratic
institutions, a high level of public awareness and education
about the issues and a level of economic well-being that enables
the public to get involved. Discussion focused not only on techniques
of encouraging public participation but also the need for the
developing world to create conditions under which meaningful
participation can occur. In closing remarks, Joseph Dellapenna,
a Rapporteur of the Water Resources Committee of the International
Law Association, also urged the importance of emerging international
norms in securing public involvement in transboundary resources
management.

At the conclusion of the symposium, Cannon
observed that although the level and quality of public engagement
in some of the world’s
great watersheds is encouraging, conditions essential for strong
public participation do not exist in others. “There is
still much to be done to establish a democratic footing for watershed
management worldwide.”